It is certain that Gurdjieff's ideas about the difference between
objective and subjective art - the one is conscious, the other not -
began to penetrate and slowly change the way Jane [Jane Heap]
perceived the art the Little Review was publishing. Suddenly, though
the impressions had gathered and been digested over a long period,
she began to see art from Gurdjieff's point of view. No doubt her
work helping Orage with the translation of Gurdjieff's All and
Everything, itself a work of objective art, was of immeasurable
value. Seeing the vast and irreconcilable difference between
objective and subjective art, her dream world in which the Little
Review was the centerpiece collapsed. She began to live with the
dawning recognition of the magazine's utter irrelevance.
The last issue of the Little Review was most noted for Jane's farewell editorial "Lost: A Renaissance." The Little Review, she wrote, had been a part of the revolution in the arts begun before the First World War. Unlike magazines that had an intellectual program, the magazine "had corresponding emotions; and consequently an energy that nothing has been able to turn aside ... except itself." The magazine was to have been a forum for modern day artists who might equal or succeed the artists of the past. The experience was otherwise. "I do not believe," Jane wrote , "that the conditions of our life can produce men who can give us masterpieces. Masterpieces are not made from chaos. If there is confusion of life there will be confusion of art. This is in no way a criticism of the men who are working in the arts. They can only express what is here to express." The magazine had published twenty-three new systems of art representing nineteen countries and none had survived. The only work they had published which approached being a masterpiece was James Joyce's Ulysses.
And so the dream was sacrificed. Jane had understood what Gurdjieff taught, proving her understanding in the fire of acting upon it. She had loved the Little Review - it had given her an identity, power and fame. And she had the courage to kill her own dream in order to begin to live the teaching. It was a tremendous act and it would open the doors for her to take her place as a teacher of the Fourth way.
(From: Ladies of the Rope by William P. Patterson )Several periodicals have gone by the name the Little Review, though "making no compromise with the public taste" was the slogan of the groundbreaking avant-garde journal founded in Chicago in 1914 by Margaret Anderson, with the aim of promoting the Arts. The last issue was distributed in 1929.